The Blues, an artistic musical form borne out of the experiences of Africans in America, has historically served as a cultural wellspring for that group in the United States. As Houston Baker offers, “The blues should be privileged in the study of American culture to precisely the extent that inventive understanding successfully converges with blues force to yield accounts that persuasively and playfully refigure expressive geographies in the United States” (11). As a way to see the world, then, “blues force” contains the potential to “refigure” any subject that falls within its purview. Working from Baker’s conception of a “blues matrix,” this paper will first analyze “Big” Bill Broonzy’s 1951 version of “Get Back (Black, Brown, White). Working from that base the paper will next look at the Rev. Joseph Lowery’s use of Black Vernacular forms, including a riff on Broonzy’s lyric, in his benediction at the 2009 presidential inauguration. The question this paper attempt to answer is, As a cultural form that has grown from the same “fertile soil” from which American racism has flourished (Dirlik 1367), does the blues offer a language and perspective in the refiguring of race relative to global modernity?
American literary scholar Houston Baker conceives black American culture broadly as a “reflexive enterprise which finds its proper figuration in blues conceived as a matrix…a point of ceaseless input and output, a web of intersecting, crisscrossing impulses always in transit” (3). Not wholly describable in terms of genre or form, the blues “exist as…a forceful condition of Afro-American inscription itself” (4). Relatedly, the blues can also be understood as an articulation of what Anne Cheng refers to as “racial melancholia [,]…a sign of rejection and…a psychic strategy in response to that rejection” (20). The blues descend historically from the social experiences of Africans in America and formally out of the exchanges between European and African musical and poetic forms. As simultaneously oppressed and poised, the blues possesses the capability to recognize the present condition and reveal strategies for future survival. Those who Gil Scott-Heron refers to as “Bluesicians” embody the convergence of “inventive understanding” with “blues force,” offering their message of resistance and hope, as Paul Gilroy notes, through sound in the form of words and music.
“Big” Bill Broonzy, the African American singer, songwriter, and guitarist, is one such artist. Cited by some in the know as an early forefather of the Chicago Blues sound, Broonzy was born in 1898 in Mississippi, but by the mid-1920’s had left the rural south in his youth for more urban environs. A prolific writer and performer in multiple genres of vernacular music, in 1951 Broonzy recorded a song entitled “Get Back (Black, Brown, White)”. The lyrics of the song were adapted from the “spoken soul” tradition of African Americans, and multiple versions are noted by black culture scholars, including Zora Neale Hurston in her anthropological and fictional works in Harlem in the 1940s (see “A Story in Harlem Slang”). Broonzy’s recorded version, then, is “always already” a hybrid performance (Baker says “half his, half someone else’s”), comprised of a traditional saying modified through the years and adapted in his recording:
This little song that I'm singin' about,
People, you all know that it's true,
If you're black and gotta work for livin',
Now, this is what they will say to you,
They says: ‘If you was white,
You's alright,
If you was brown,
Stick around,
But if you's black, oh, brother,
Get back, get back, get back.’ (Broonzy 1951)
In each stanza the last six lines are repeated (in the form of a refrain), conveying the racial status quo of the time. The refrain bears witness to the raced and spaced mandate of Jim Crow segregation, while at the same time issuing the directive for select groups to exist (“You’s alright”), reside (“Stick around”), or move (“Get back”) in accordance with that mandate. Read this way, white(ness) exists at the center, and brown hovers in the interim serving as a buffer. “Black,” positioned at the furthest point away from the white center, can also be read as in motion, ever-moving outward but never completely discarded, not wanted but needed (“Get back, get back, get back”).
Rhetorically, the opening lines of the first verse (“People you all know that it’s true”) form a signified lyric, simultaneously addressing the “intimate sphere” as working blacks and the “public sphere” less familiar with group’s experiences (Taylor 37-38). The mention of work in the first verse of the song also reveals an understanding of the interrelatedness of race and economics, as “one is…obliged to agree that race relations are directly linked to economic processes” (Hall 19). In later verses, Broonzy further references this link in terms of unequal pay for the same amount of work (“They was payin’ him a dollar/And they was payin’ me fifty cent”) and unequal access to state-sponsored services (“I went to the unemployment office/I got a number and I got in line/They called everybody’s number/But they never did call mine”). Thus Broonzy’s first verse takes space into account, relative to its “intersections” with race and economics .
The last verse of “Get Back” addresses what Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw refers to as “a large and continuing project for subordinated people” (13).
I helped win sweet victories,
With my plow and hoe,
Now, I want you to tell me, brother,
What you gonna do 'bout the old Jim Crow?
Now, if you is white,
You's alright,
If you's brown,
Stick around,
But if you's black, oh, brother,
Get back, get back, get back. (Broonzy 1951)
Her application of an “anti-essentialist critique” to feminism’s categorization of “woman” is analogous to Broonzy’s critical use of phenotype, such that, “categories we consider natural or merely representational are actually socially constructed in a linguistic economy of difference (12, italics added). The colors (black, brown, white) function both denotatively in the process of naming and connotatively in the process of valuing the name. Persons are never explicitly identified as “colored” in the song, nor is there an expression of a relationship between race and geography, which might gloss nationality (e.g., “Asian man” or “Native American man”). Instead, people are addressed via the use of non-modified nouns and pronouns. Thus, for lack of a better phrase, people are people, distinct from a “colored” designation and alternately serving as subjects within and (subject) to the song.
At the same time though, color conveys the relationship of phenotype to location and movement. The lyrics describe a racial “big bang” with stable (white) objects at the center, slowly moving (brown) objects in intermediary areas, and fast moving (black) objects at the outer edges of the event. Still yet there is agency, as the blackness forms the edge that defines the location of the center (“Get Back” never becomes “Go Away”). By addressing color in terms of naming and valuing, the blues and Broonzy challenge “the particular values attached [to racial categories], and the way those values foster and create social hierarchies” (Crenshaw 13).
Broonzy’s version of “Get Back” came out of the time and place of Jim Crow segregation. The last verse addresses the participation and systematic oppression of blackfolk within the American post-WWII framework. He poses a question, “Now, I want you to tell me, brother /What you gonna do 'bout the old Jim Crow?” Again, the interlocutor is signified: “brother” describes those in the struggle against racial segregation and the empowered beneficiaries of that system who unwittingly honor that title via proximity. Broonzy recognizes the Foucaultian “relations of power” at work here. He is simultaneously identifying oppressors and oppressed as “related” via the system of segregation, granting each agency in the relationship.
Ever attentive to context, the blues expresses the reality and possibility of the racial moment. When a version of the first verse of “Get Back” is incorporated into the 2009 benediction at the inauguration of President Barack Obama, there exists in that moment the possibility for change that is conveyed in Broonzy’s 1951 version. The question is whether the blues still functions, via Reverend Lowery’s adaptation, in its capacity to express the reality and the possibility of the racial moment. Is this a post-racial blues?
Rev. Joseph Lowery knows firsthand of the blues that Broonzy sings. Born in Huntsville, Alabama in 1921, Lowery also spent time in Chicago during his middle school years before returning to the south, where he participated firsthand in leadership roles during the Civil Rights movement. A contemporary and confidant of Martin Luther King, Jr., Lowery helped organize the Montgomery Bus boycott of 1955 and co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) with King in 1957 (Wikipedia). Now retired from the pulpit and semi- retired from the public, his is a long and distinguished career that I will not attempt detail here. That he was selected by President Obama to deliver the benediction on January 20, 2009 was not accident, however. The term “post-racial” being bandied about, Lowery embodied for many the struggles of America’s de jure segregationist past. While Obama may not have known the words that Lowery was to deliver, the choice of Lowery to speak at the event was in itself a recognition of the man as an icon of the civil rights movement and the multifarious importance of the swearing in of the first black president of the nation.
And Lowery delivers the goods. His prayer opens by quoting a verse from “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” alternately known as the “Negro National Anthem,” a song written in 1900 by Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man author James Weldon Johnson (Wikipedia). In opening the prayer, Lowery quotes verbatim from the song’s last verse: “God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou who has brought us thus far along the way, thou who has by thy might led us into the light, keep us forever in the path” (“Lift Every Voice”, “Transcript”) Thus, Lowery enmeshes his prayer simultaneously within the religious tradition of the black pulpit and with the secular tradition of opening (black) functions with the song . It is interesting (if not significant) to note that Lowery chooses the closing verse of “Lift Every Voice” to open the benediction, and riffs on the first verse of Broonzy’s “Get Back” to close his prayer.
The works, as they are presented in the (meta)temporal order that they were published, also place the moment of the inauguration in conversation with the movement (read: progress) of blackfolk from “behind the veil,” to walking right up to and calling out the Jim Crow color line. In opening and closing with references to African American rhetorical traditions, Lowery is shining bright light on the present by relating it, via his rhetorical choices to “a dark past” (Johnson). He is, already, altering the relationship of darkness and light, challenging the fall of shadows.
Throughout, Lowery embodies his role of the black preacher in the pulpit on Sunday. His prayer references King’s “mountain top,” and employs an Obama 1-2 combination: “Yes we can work together to achieve a more perfect union” (Lowery, “Benediction”). There is also rhyming, alliteration, and repetition, all of which are germane to black preachers operating in the tradition of “spoken soul” (Rickford and Rickford 46). In keeping with the context of the performance, Lowery assumes the discourse of the black preacher throughout, such that “the way in which [his] sermon is presented becomes almost as crucial as its content” (40).
Lowery’s opening is mirrored in his closing, with a signified reference to the religious and the secular traditions in a play on form and content. Further, by evoking Broonzy’s lyric the prayer also slips into the blues matrix.
Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around -- (laughter) -- when yellow will be mellow -- (laughter) -- when the red man can get ahead, man -- (laughter) -- and when white will embrace what is right. (Lowery, “Benediction”)
The historical moment of the swearing in of nation’s first nonwhite president provided a space for Lowery to express hope for a day that was (half) fulfilled the moment in which he offered these words. Affectively, Lowery’s benediction was issued from a place of joy for the present and hope for the future. In his call for inclusiveness, Lowery implies a dismantling of the racist hierarchy and a disruption of a racial binary where only blacks and whites are considered as positive and negative figures in the relationship. With the inclusion of “yellow” and “red”, immigrant and indigenous people are offered recognition within the linguistic economy of difference (Crenshaw 12). Lowery is poetically and politically refiguring who has a claim to full status in the United States, without depicting “multiculturalism…[as] a polite and euphemistic way of affirming persisting, unequal power relationships by representing them as equal differences” (Davis 44). Again, the blues not only represents the present, it also strategizes for the future.
In evoking Broonzy, Lowery acknowledges the presence of the blues, that which Houston Baker offers “are what Jacques Derrida might describe as the ‘always already’ of Afro-American Culture” (Baker 4). In the context of this historical moment, the blues have to be present to mark it as valid . Again, it is 2009, the “postracial” moment is occurring (a black man is president now!), and here is the blues. The slave as “vernacular,” that is, “borne on his master’s estate,” relates directly to the “vernacular” as art borne out of that experience (Baker 2). In other words, as black culture (via the linguistic) is present, so too is the history of black Americans present in that moment. Baker’s evocation of the “Blues as Matrix,” as an expression of “both lack and…possibility” simultaneously accounts for the (racist) past and (postracist) present (9). Considered within the moment of Lowery’s benediction, the vernacular is evoked in a blessing of the highest political office in the land. At the same time, though, Baker notes, the blues matrix also
avoids simple dualities. It perpetually achieves it effects as a fluid and multivalent network. It is only when ‘understanding’-the analytical work of a translator who translates the infinite changes of the blues-converges with such blues ‘force,’ however, that adequate explanatory perception (and half-creation) occurs. (Baker 9)
Understood through the terms of Baker’s the blues matrix, Lowery becomes the “translator who translates” the blues- now “half” his, “half” Broonzy’s (who got it himself “half-created”)- from 1951 to the present. Both are functioning within the blues matrix relative to their sociohistoric contexts in an expression of loss and possibility (Baker 7). Each is also introducing and deriving meaning via a “vernacular code…constituted from the forced new beginning of racial slavery” (Gilroy 130). Considered within Paul Gilroy’s expression of New World black culture, the blues are of those “wrongly believed to be simple cultural commodities [that] have been used to communicate a powerful ethical and political commentary on rights, justice, and democracy that articulates but also transcends criticism of modern racial typology and the ideologies of white supremacy.” Lowery, functioning within the blues matrix also operates within a “discourse of recognition,” where those “understanding” the form and function of his vernacular reside within the “intimate sphere,” and where those newly recognized (“yellow” and “red”) are a part of the “pubic sphere” (Taylor 37-38). Where Charles Taylor is critical of pitfalls of ascribing to either particularist or universalist discourses, here “blues force” accounts for the constitutive “half creation” of each sphere by the other.
Lowery, through his use of the blues, acknowledges the historical and spatial changes in the process of racialization in keeping with Arif Dirlik, whose work calls for the recognition of a “global modernity” (Dirlik 1364). The relationship of space to race wholly present in Broonzy’s blues, thus, must be at least “half present” in Lowery’s riff. Relative to this, the 2009 version makes some notable rhetorical moves. Lowery prays, “[W]e ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back.” The request here is not for the day, but for the ability to “work for the day.” Given the choice between an expression of lack that asks for fulfillment (e.g., “please bring forth the day”), and thus situates the “asker” as lacking agency, Lowery instead asks for the possibility of potential, the attempt at agency that would be denied in the claim of victim status (Brown). Lowery is rhetorically sensitive to stasis and movement in his version. Notice the phrasing, “black will not be asked to get back.” Of all the ways that Lowery could have played this , he does so such that a demand is never introduced by either party. In other words, the question will not be asked of blacks or by blacks. Thus, black does not have to refuse the request to “get back” (which re-inscribes the victim/victimizer relationship), as it is never not ever a demand.
Accounting for the “blues force” as an indelible part of this nation’s culture and language provides a productive way to read the processes of racialization in the moment and historically. However, how might Baker’s conception of the “blues matrix” react to the notion of assemblages? Brian Massumi’s opines that intersectionality and by connection “positionality begin…with taking movement from the picture” (cite in Puar 212). To resist this fixity, Massumi starts with movement, such that
Position no longer comes first, with movement as a problematic second. It is secondary to movement and derived from it. It is retro movement, movement residue. The problem is no longer to explain how there can be change given positioning. The problem is to explain the wonder that there can be stasis given the primacy of process. (cited in Puar 214)
Baker’s conception of the blues also accounts for motion: “Like signification itself, blues are always nomadically wandering” (9). At the same time, intersections and “junctions” are necessary figures in the discourse. That productive tension that yields the “blues force” is an effect of the coexistence of stasis and movement that come out of the experiences of slavery and exodus (Gilroy’s “Roots and Routes”). So while Baker use of the “matrix” evokes the image of the “grid,” there are limitless possibilities if the figuring of points on that grid are considered evidence of movement. Here, Baker and Massumi confer on the idea that intersections are the necessary “residue” of movement.
In effect, the blues is borne out of the “gel” of assemblages (Puar 202), always “half-created” from that which already exists. There is no way that it cannot be, so long as race, space, and power relations all bear influence on cultural understandings. The malleability of the blues and African American rhetorics always already produce analyses and strategizes relevant to wherever lack and possibility exist. If “the heartiest weed teaches the history of the garden (Yoshino 35), so does the blues continually offer language for those who will listen and speak for understanding and change.
References
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